It is good news that places like Ashington, Stratford upon Avon and Okehampton are to get their railway restored and a smattering of reopened or new stations as well. This is progress in the right direction. Still a long way to go. As with our sister organisation Railfuture, we take some of the kudos for ushering the agenda along over the years and indeed predecessors to ERTA organisation, decades.
We are led to believe we face a Climate Emergency and so a need to cut fossil fuel burning, exhaust and tyre friction on hard surfaces is essential to lower public respiratory illness and premature death as well as cutting greenhouse gases which erode the atmosphere and creates conditions against human and wildlife habitat.
In 1993 I was at a UN Conference in Manchester where we marked the occasion of the calculated crossing of a threshold from a predominantly rural planet to a majoritively urban planet and 30 years on, we are seeing that worked out with bombardments of development, but with stretched resources, high demand and land use being a premium and scarce resource. Infrastructure has mainly been the presumption of roads and road vehicles, even public transport, whereas historically, we need to rectify the rail deficit for passenger and freight. See: Rio 92: https://en.wikipedia.org/
ERTA continues to push for route protection, reopenings, rebuilds and choice for public transport users. A development of 500 houses at 2.5 cars per household means 1500 extra vehicles per day on local roads. So the issues abound. We do need more volunteers to take responsibility and help us reliably enable more to be done on the right lines! Thank you.
Copies pdf free via richard.erta@gmail.com
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